MINNEAPOLIS (AP) - May 30, 2008
"I wanted to try and do some sort of justice to that event,"
Erdrich says about the killings in her home state. "It was such a
wrenching event in my mind."
Erdrich's response was to write about what happens "when
vengeance is done ... but no justice is done." The result was
"The Plague of Doves," which has won rave reviews from critics
and is in its third printing since being published in April.
In "The Plague of Doves," three Indians are lynched after a
farm family is murdered on the edge of a North Dakota reservation
in 1911. All three are innocent; the real killer, revealed at the
end of the book, escapes detection and punishment.
Erdrich named one of the lynching victims in her book Paul Holy
Track, after the 13-year-old victim of the historic lynching.
"You know 13-year-olds - they're children. How can you lynch a
child?" Erdrich asks in amazement during an interview in a
sandwich shop next to her bookstore, BirchBark Books, in
Minneapolis.
Erdrich, of European and Ojibwe descent, sees parallels between
the hunger for vengeance that followed the murders of six members
of a North Dakota farm family in Emmons County more than a century
ago and the aftermath of 9/11.
"I think vengeance, rather than sitting back and allowing
justice to be done over time, is really so much a part of our
history. And unfortunately, it's part of our present, as well,"
Erdrich said.
"This is common after any sort of horrific event. There's a
terrible thirst for someone to blame, for someone to be caught and
punished right away, and immediately. We saw that after 9/11. I
felt the same thing in my own heart. ... And it became twisted
around until we're in this terrible situation we are in now."
"The Plague of Doves" draws its title from now-extinct
passenger pigeons. Many of its chapters originally appeared as
magazine stories. Erdrich was struggling with writing a science
fiction book that had ballooned to 400 pages when she turned to the
stories that make up novel.
"Finally I looked at them and realized they all connected, and
I had this wonderful experience of realizing I'd written a mystery.
Then I had to go and put the clues back in," she says.
In the real-life Emmons County lynching, a mob of 40 men stormed
the jail, dragged off three defendants with ropes around their
necks and hanged them from a beef windlass used to suspend cattle
carcasses. One of the lynching victims was a French-Indian man who
had been granted a new trial by the North Dakota Supreme Court. The
others were Holy Track and another full-blooded Indian, according
to a New York Times account of the lynching.
No one in the lynch mob ever was prosecuted, and two other
suspects, who were jailed miles away in Bismarck, N.D, were
released after the lynching.
Erdrich sets "The Plague of Doves" in the fictional town of
Pluto, N.D. She is reluctant to identify the book's geography,
which does not conform to North Dakota's.
"Because if you're from North Dakota you want to locate it, but
I don't locate it anywhere," Erdrich says. She explains she wants
the town "to be more universal. And also because I don't want
people to think it's about them, because it's not. It's imagined.
It's not about any particular town or any particular people."
Erdrich, whose first novel "Love Medicine" was published in
1984 and won the National Book Critics Circle Award, opened the way
for other Native American authors, said novelist David Treuer, an
Ojibwe from the Leech Lake Reservation in northern Minnesota.
"Just the brilliance of (her novel 'Tracks') helped me imagine
myself as a writer and my world as worthwhile material for
exploration," said Treuer, who cites the lyricism and "emotional
complexity" of Erdrich's work.
"In the pantheon (of American Indian writers), she's at the
top," Treuer said.
Erdrich grew up in Wahpeton, in southeastern North Dakota, and
is a member of the Turtle Mountain Band of Chippewa in northern
North Dakota. Like her character Evelina in "The Plague of
Doves," Erdrich is of mixed descent - her father, Ralph Erdrich,
is German-American and her mother, Rita Gourneau Erdrich is
French-Ojibwe.
Her mixed heritage is reflected in Erdrich's fine features and
long, gray-tinged hair. The soft-spoken Erdrich appears a bit
distracted on this day - she confesses she looks "sort of hopeless
and desperate" because of that unfinished science fiction book.
But she changes into a denim outfit with colorful earrings and
gamely poses for pictures in her bookstore.
Erdrich, who turns 54 on June 7, includes autobiographical
touches in "The Plague of Doves." The oldest of seven children,
she remembers trying to watch "The Three Stooges" on television
and having to use pliers to turn on the TV because the knobs were
hidden away - just as her character Evelina does.
Erdrich says she enjoyed writing about Evelina, who is a
descendant of both people who were lynched in "The Plague of
Doves" and the lynchers.
"We are all mixed up together. There's been so much
finger-pointing and blame," Erdrich says. "I'm a mixed
background; so many people are, of this country. We all have
mixtures in our backgrounds, now."
Copyright © 2024 WPVI-TV. All Rights Reserved.
